When, last month, President Trump threatened to destroy an Iranian bridge or power plant, tit for tat, any time a missile or drone attacked an oil tanker in the Strait of Hormuz, he was promising what would have looked, not very long ago, like an unconscionable act of military retribution: attacking energy infrastructure to impose pain on civilians.
They used to call this kind of thing a war crime. But somewhat suddenly, it has become a nearly universal feature of 21st-century conflict. Iran has been targeting energy infrastructure around the Persian Gulf since the very first day of fighting in February. Ukraine and Russia have been striking each other’s oil refineries and power grids for several years now. In Gaza, Israel has destroyed much of the electricity distribution network, periodically blocked the arrival of fuel and struck nearly every hospital and medical facility in the region. In Sudan, there have been drone attacks on power plants, substations and fuel depots from both sides in the ongoing civil war, plunging the country into blackouts and humanitarian crisis. In Yemen, the Houthis are firing on tankers in the Red Sea to restrict the flow of oil through the Bab al-Mandab Strait and are reportedly planning strikes against the largest oil production facility in Saudi Arabia, in a bid to pinch global markets ahead of the American midterm elections.
At West Point’s Modern War Institute, they are calling it the age of energy warfare. All around the world, civilian power supply — technically off-limits, according to international law, wherever that still applies — has become a “frontline target” in a new kind of conflict, four experts wrote in the report, published last month. Electricity plants, substations, transmission grids — military planners have always taken note of these systems, along with hospitals and water systems and other logistical features of civilian infrastructure. But for decades it has been rare for great powers to openly target energy supply, and often a kind of humanitarian outrage followed when anyone did, which meant that a broad expectation of civility prevailed. “Such sanctuary,” the authors of the West Point report wrote, “is over.” Energy infrastructure has become a much more common target, particularly as conflicts drag on in regions temptingly full of power plants and pipelines. “All of a sudden,” says Morgan Bazilian, an energy-systems scholar at the Payne Institute for Public Policy at the Colorado School of Mines and an author of the report, “our distaste for anything outside of the rules of war doesn’t look all that strong.”
The change is partly technological, with drones and other autonomous weapons making it much easier to strike behind enemy lines, much harder to defend against such attacks and perhaps less pressing to consider whether they constitute violation of some high-minded norms. For decades, military analysts liked to talk about “fourth-generation warfare,” in which stronger national militaries found themselves engaging with nonstate actors — insurgents, terrorists, mercenaries and private contractors. But the battles of the war on terror now seem like relatively distant memories, and attacks on energy systems have emerged as one striking harbinger of what’s to come. We may be watching the arrival of a fifth generation, in which even superpowers act a bit more as insurgents do, in which the line between open fighting and economic conflict grows harder to discern and in which the prohibition against strikes on nonmilitary targets begins to look more like a relic of an earlier age.
Last Thursday, the United States dropped a 2,000-pound bomb on a family home on Iran’s Qeshm Island without any apparent military connection. That same week, Minnesota officials concluded that a cyberattack on municipal drinking-water systems was most likely the work of Iranian hackers.
There are more wars than there used to be — worldwide, the number of conflicts has nearly doubled over the last 15 years. These wars are bloodier, too, with the annual death toll more than twice as high in the 2020s as it was in the 2010s and nearly five times as high as in the 2000s.
In the rich and relatively secure countries of the world, we were a bit slow to note the changes, persistent in the faith that war had grown rarer, more moral and more circumscribed. According to this logic, wars happened within an international legal order grounded in the Geneva Conventions and enforced by superpowers who liked to see themselves as moral actors on the world stage. Total war was a thing of the past, we may have told ourselves, with even relatively ugly battles now governed by relatively strict rules of engagement. And while brutal conflict may have persisted in places like Syria or Sudan, up in the unipolar north, we believed, we dispatched our fighter jets like gentlemen.
The invasion of Ukraine was an alarming break — not just the first true land war in Europe in a generation but one that quickly recast the shape of war for the generation to come. In the fall of 2022, Russia launched more than a thousand missile strikes against Ukrainian power plants and substations, autotransformers and the electric grid itself, according to Ukrainian officials; the W.H.O. had also tallied 700 strikes against hospitals and other health care facilities in the first nine months of the war.
Then came the drone revolution. In Ukraine, drones have remade the battlefield so thoroughly that the front is now effectively frozen, a next-generation form of trench warfare, with the frontline “kill zone” so clouded by drones that on average — according to the head of the C.I.A., at least — new Russian arrivals are killed within a half-hour. Robots and drones are now seizing territory on their own. Small drones target soldiers relieving themselves in outhouses and drive individuals out of homes into exposed air. Ukraine recruits gamers to be drone operators, “Ready Player One”-style, then manages campaigns in part by posting gamified performance metrics on public points-based leaderboards. Russia now has a similar program.
In certain ways, drones have made war more precise. But they have also helped widen the scope of conflict. The front may be effectively frozen, but Ukrainian drones are now frequently striking Russian energy targets that not very long ago seemed not simply too far to reach but beyond the pale as well. Between 2022 and 2024, Ukraine’s attacks on Russian energy infrastructure roughly doubled. Between 2024 and 2025, they doubled again. Early in the war, Ukraine was successfully targeting faraway Russian energy infrastructure perhaps a couple of times a month; for most of last year, it has averaged about 12 times each month. Drone pilots are now reportedly instructed by military planners to hit particular chimneys, identified as especially vulnerable nodes, to knock out production or distribution for longer.
Just in the past few months, Ukrainian drones and missiles have targeted Russian oil refineries, oil depots and oil export facilities. They’ve targeted Crimea’s electric grid and the Black Sea tanker fleet. Outside Moscow, Ukraine hit an oil refinery that supplies more than a third of the capital’s fuel supply, knocking operations offline through the end of the year. Early last month, it struck the country’s largest oil refinery — located in Siberia, 1,750 miles from Ukraine. A few weeks later, it hit one 1,500 miles from the front. The damage to these refineries, visible from space, lingers for months; many of those targeted over the last year are still struggling to restore even half of their previous production.
All told, these strikes have taken out between one-third and one-half of Russia’s entire oil refining capacity, some estimates suggest, and half the country is now dealing with fuel shortages and rationing. Within Russia, the result is what the defense analyst Michael Kofman has called a “genuine fuel crisis.” In Crimea, coupons for limited amounts of gas were selling out within minutes, only to be resold at significant markup. In June, all such sales were suspended — one of more than 50 regions in Russia where sales are being limited. Consumer prices grew five times as fast in June as they did in May, according to the Russian central bank, but energy prices aren’t the only way the new rules of war have hit home. Ukrainian drones have targeted civilian apartment complexes deep behind the front and are now routinely striking distribution centers of the Amazon-style retailer Wildberries.
In Ukraine and Russia, where pipelines and supply chains figured in earlier conflicts, energy warfare now looks like an endless volley of missiles and drones, some ending in spectacular midair interceptions and others in apocalyptic scenes of explosive fire and billowing Vantablack smoke.
In Iran, we are seeing something different — not just energy warfare but energy war, a conflict fought over and within energy markets, with military operations designed primarily to shape global prices and global supply of fuel. After Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz in March, Dmitri Medvedev, the former president of Russia, compared the “Hormuz weapon” to a nuclear arsenal. But it works only if the price of gas becomes painful for American customers. The United States launched its war to destroy Iran’s nuclear program and degrade its military, but for months now the White House has been primarily focused on liberating all that fuel and bringing it to market.
In the very first days of the war, Iran targeted not just American regional military facilities but also oil refineries and gas fields, pipelines and export terminals, and especially the oil tankers idling in fear in the strait — not to mention hotels and malls and airports around the region. Now and again, Iran has also targeted desalination plants that provide up to 90 percent of drinking water to U.S. allies in the region. Iranian leadership appears to be in no hurry to negotiate an end to hostilities, preferring to press its strategic advantage and secure a perpetual claim on the strait and all global energy flows passing through it.
At first, the United States and Israel appeared more focused on traditional military targets, that first-day double-tap attack on the school in Minab aside. But in March, a strike on Tehran’s oil depots blanketed the city of 10 million in clouds of toxic airborne petrochemicals. And as the war drew on, the United States and Israel have struck oil depots and gas fields, electric grids and even individual power lines — in addition to imposing their own blockade of the strait to restrict Iranian exports. Lately, Iran has claimed that they’ve been targeting desalination plants, too.
This harm to ordinary people is one price of a long stalemate. The price of oil spiked with the first strikes and the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, but it never got as high — or as painful — as most experts feared. For stretches of the spring and summer, it wasn’t even clear whether the conflict was active or governed by cease-fire or the ambiguous “memorandum of understanding.” Energy flows would only partly and tentatively resume; prices would drift downward without ever returning to prewar levels. Diplomacy was conducted through leaks, often false, designed to push traders or reassure investors. In nearly six months, American missile stockpiles have been woefully diminished, American troops have been forced to evacuate from bases in the region, and American claims to hegemonic control over regional energy flows have been decimated. It’s a worse defeat than Vietnam, Foreign Policy has declared, and yet that defeat shows up much more clearly in energy markets than on the battlefield.
On July 29, a Central Command intelligence officer sent a message to military analysts, desperately soliciting ideas “for new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran.” The next day, Trump pledged the harshest assault on Iran’s energy infrastructure since the war began, then backed off in the hope of re-establishing the prewar status quo of an open strait — which may require an acknowledgment that Iran is now in control of it. In February, the world’s premier military tried to launch a conventional display of air-power dominance. Iran responded with energy warfare. Energy warfare won.
Source images for illustration above: Omar Al-Qattaa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images; Paula Bronstein/Getty Images; John Moore/Getty Images.
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